


Lived Within My Dreams

by madame_faust



Series: The Jeromeverse [1]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 10:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20095603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madame_faust/pseuds/madame_faust
Summary: Half-starved and overcome with fever, a teenage Erik finds himself dreaming of what his life might have been. This was written for Timebird84's 'Things I Dreamt Last Night' writing challenge.





	Lived Within My Dreams

Never in his life had he ever truly been _abandoned_, until now. The home where had been born, where he had been raised, he left that behind of his own accord. There was another child, you see. After thirteen years of disappointment and heartache. Another child quickening beneath his mother's heart. She was so careful, this time. Not to work too hard. Or to get excited. Or to go about too much. All were in hopes that, this time, nothing would go wrong.

The hope, the tentative expectation that things would be different...it was too much to bear. He so wanted to please his parents, to make them happy, but in all his life he'd never seen such smiles of anticipation, such imagined joy as he had when they announced they were having a second child. To dim that light seemed a sin, like murder was a sin. And so, feigning an illness that kept him back from Mass, he packed away a few things (clothes, his violin, the mask, of course) and left. Ran away. Taking with him the shadow he'd cast over their lives since his birth so that only the light of anticipated happiness might shine through. 

Life at the fair, where he first sought employment had been, if not cheerful, bearable. At first, the owners had been content to pass him off as a medical experiment in the vein of Galvani and Volta. Sometimes he was billed as The Living Corpse - a child who passed of a wasting illness, only to be restored to ambulation through electric intervention (the hot wires they poked into his arms to achieve the desired effect burned at left little white scores in his skin that did not fade, even when the wounds healed over), or else, further away from the cities and universities, a Frankenstein monster. Built of lifeless materials and given voice and motion through dark sorcery. He liked that story rather better. There were no wires or sparks of flame, then. And they let him play his violin. And sing, if the crowds seemed bored with the patter and usual routine.

But then their little corpse-boy started to cough. It interrupted the performance and destroyed the illusion that he was anything but a living boy - a dangerously thin, hideously ugly boy, but a living creature nevertheless. The cough turned into a chronic wheeze, which made his breathing audible and labored. He was given a few days off, to recuperate, but he was not getting any better. 

When the wheeze became a wooshing intake of air, he never seemed able to get enough _air_ \- they left him. Sewed his meager take into the lining of his coat, wished him luck, and left him on the side of the road as the wagons clattered away, already talking about their next featured act. 

The air about him was warm, but he was racked with fever and chills. Each step he took was as labored as his breathing and harder still because he walked without purpose, wandered without a goal. He had nowhere to go. No one to run to. And no one to take care of him.

Eventually he came to a little stone barn; whether it was in use or not, it was hard to say. There was a pounding in his head that made it difficult to see and think. Anyway, if the master of the house should object to finding him there, he still possessed enough of his own faculties to prefer to exit the world quickly, being shot or having his throat cut, than to linger on for unknown days or weeks should hunger, thirst, or this miserable sickness take him first.

He bedded down in the hayloft, slipping on the rungs of the ladder leading upward several times before he managed to haul himself up, bury himself in hay and, shivering still with his threadbare coat wrapped around him, fall into unconsciousness. 

Was he awake? Asleep? Dreaming? If so, it was a vivid dream - or hallucination. For when his jaundice-yellow eyes fluttered open he was not lying in a barn, staring up into the red face of some irate farmer, but instead the pale, homely face of a woman he spent the last two years trying to forget.

_Maman?_

The word wouldn't come through his dry, aching throat, but she smiled down at him and stroked his thin hair back on his head, feeling his brow with the back of her hand.

_"Poor thing,"_ she crooned, softly and pityingly. _"I'll fetch you a glass of water. Be still."_

He tried to sit up, but the room spun and tilted and he lay down again with a groan. There was no doubt, however, that this was his room, with the faded papered walls, the model ship forever poised to set sail in its glass jar atop his bureau, there was a mattress beneath him, not a hard wooden floor and a pillow under his head. The quilt that had been tucked under his chin smelled like a cedar chest and lavender sachet. Scents that he would always associate with his parents' home. 

Soft footsteps padded over the threshold and the door creaked on its hinges. He thought his mother had come back, but was surprised to see small hands, like a doll's hands, reach over the end of the bed. A crop of curly black hair, a smooth forehead, and two large dark eyes peered at him. The small brow creased in concern.

_"Brother?"_ the child asked in a high-pitched, sweet, lisping voice. _"Sing? Feel better? Sing, brother? Please?"_

_"Émilie!"_ The woman was back. She hastily placed the water beside him on the table next to the bed, and ushered the child out. _"Your brother is very sick. He needs rest and quiet. He'll sing for you soon. Very soon. But not now."_

Outside the room, the child started to cry, the sound muffled by the door the woman closed behind her. 

The glass of water was cold against his hands and soothing as he sipped it. The pain (pain, truly, pain such that was not supposed to be felt in a dream) ebbed and he thought he slept again, soothed and surrounded by the scents of cedar and lavender.

He woke (woke? slept? dreamed still?) again, the sun low in the sky. The woman returned, with broth this time, which she held to his lips to nourish him. She felt his forehead again and frowned, muttering, _"Too warm,"_ to herself. She wet a lace-trimmed handkerchief with water and placed it on the back of his neck. Then left him again.

The door soon opened and this time it was neither the woman nor the child. It was a man, tall and whippet-thin, with a high forehead and light brown eyes. The ends of his large mustache twitched as he surveyed the figure on the bed with a wan smile. There was a book held in his long, elegant fingers.

_"Your mother says your fever is still high,"_ he said, sitting in a chair the woman had recently abandoned, pulling it close to the side of the bed. _"Not, _Typee_, I think. But I picked up another of his novels when I was in town today, it ought to be less...overly stimulating."_

The man winked at him, cleared his throat, and began to read, _"'Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.' - Sensible advice, my boy, perhaps you ought to think of becoming a sailor..."_

The next time, when he opened his eyes, it was to dark brown rafters and the feeling of hay beneath him. His shirt was damp; he'd sweated out the fever. 

His eyes were wet when he sat up, and his head swam. He blinked once, twice, _hard_, first to summon back the vision of cream-colored walls, then to stop the tears that threatened when he could not. 

A lowing sounded beneath him - a cow, a working barn, he needed to move before he was discovered. Stumbling back down the ladder, shaking the hay from his clothes, he hurried away in the purple-blue light of the pre-dawn, weak, but breathing a bit easier than he was. 

He'd found the main road, was getting the last of the hay out from beneath his coat collar when he felt it. A crumbled bit of fabric between his collar and his neck.

Yellow eyes went wide and his breath caught when he beheld what lay in his trembling right hand. A white handkerchief. Edged in lace. 

The farmhouse where he'd taken refuge was on a hill. In the distance, he could see the spires and chimneys of the nearby town. It was a far, but walkable distance. He could discover where he was, at least.

And then, he thought, holding the crumpled handkerchief tight in his fist, once he discovered where he was, he might..._might_, if he didn't lose his nerve, have somewhere to go.


End file.
